The Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to a footfall detection assembly to measure flooring performance and useful life as well as associated systems and methods.
Background
Flooring performance testing is an important aspect of the flooring industry and, particularly, the carpeting industry. For example, carpets are generally expected to last from about 5 to about 10 years and are usually sold with a warranty based, at least partially, on the expected wear performance over time. Currently, wear testing is performed using either contract walking or mechanical tumblers. Contract walking involves lining a floor with a plurality of 9″ by 22″ carpet samples and having the contract walkers complete, e.g., 20,000 pedestrian laps over the plurality of samples. A contract walker will step in different locations on the 9″×22″sample as they do the walk test. While contract walking has the benefit of replicating real-world conditions, it is a costly and slow testing method. Mechanical tumbling, an alternative to contract walking, involves placing the carpet samples on the inner surface of a rolling drum and placing a weight inside that is configured to tumble on the carpet samples as the drum is rotated, thereby inducing wear. Mechanical tumbling is cheaper and faster than contract walking but does not readily correlate to real-world conditions. In either case, trafficked carpet samples are then graded, e.g. on a visual scale from 1-5. Such grading scales are subjective and do not lend themselves to clearly communicating the relative performance of different flooring samples.
Accordingly, a need exists for improved devices, systems and method for flooring performance testing that provide for improved accuracy in predicting field performance of flooring samples, that allow measurement at a reduced cost compared to current methods, and that enable effective comparisons between the performance of different flooring choices.